Mobile phone manufacturer Turing Space Industries (TSI) has begun development on the AO:X Project – a new parallel blockchain and DApp platform. At the center of the project is the AOX Universe, an artificial reality environment built on TSI’s blockchain, the AOX Parallel Chain.

When completed, the platform is envisioned as enabling the creation of futuristic cities, offering commerce-enabled opportunities, allow users to share music/art, all powered by interaction with avatars (including their favorite celebrities).

The AOX Parallel Chain uses 51 parallel chains around the world, each running its own DPoS consensus, based on lock Pipelining Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Federated Delegated Proof of Stake to reduce latency, and achieving federated finality. AOX’s blockchain consensus model, called AOX Consensus, was designed to address common scalability problems.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Does the name of your company, with the “Turing” in there, reflect your ambitions for what this space would become?

STEVE CHAO: Well, the name of the company was formed because Alan Turing’s grandnephew, Thomas Turing, is a good friend of mine, and we talked about using the name for my company back in 2015. Obviously, it was carefully chosen for an ultimately free world full of digital and vision intelligence. But I think we’re only about to realize a very brief vision of what Turing was hoping to do, hoping to achieve. But the space in the future would greatly reflect that name in a great way.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Sure. Who do you see as early adopters on this?

STEVE CHAO:You’re referring to our blockchain project?

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Yes. Do you see it being used primarily by gamers and people who are very familiar with virtual reality? Who do you see is the early adopters?

STEVE CHAO:Initially, to be honest, the parallel chain is a very special program. It’s called AOX Universe. And AOX Universe would be largely dependent on the media, meaning the gamers, entertainers, even musicians in the very beginning. Because those people have the capability of creating a huge influence over the rest of the consumers. So that would be our primary goal in the beginning. But the underlying infrastructure goes way beyond the media world. It could potentially get into the finance sector, the payments. Obviously, there are a lot of blockchain projects already in the space. But what we’re able and capable of doing in the future is blending with what we have always done for the last few years. So, blending the tech media telecom, and now we’re adding the “B”, the blockchain. So, what Turing is doing, not just blockchain itself, but the integration of the four I just talked about. The tech, the media, the telecom and blockchain.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: What equipment does someone need to participate in this world?

STEVE CHAO:So, let me give you an example. Currently, in a greatly centralized world of programs, most of the rules are being defined by a central authority, because it’s cloud-based. But in an extremely populated gaming world, people or consumers have the need to create their own realm, to create their own rules, as opposed to having a centralized authority controlling most of their transaction behaviors. Anyone can be a host in the AOX universe. Anyone can be a host, they’re able to facilitate transactions, facilitate their own world, and that’s really what this new type of gaming-free world is going for. And we see a lot of problems with these centralized worlds, or sometimes your coins get diminished. Hackers hack into your program and they take away the stuff you own. Because none of those exist on the blockchain. Most of which exist on the centralized server. So those problems will continue to grow, and blockchain is a great fix for those issues.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: So getting back to my question, what equipment do you need to participate in this world? Do you need virtual glasses, do you need a high-speed computer? What do you need?

STEVE CHAO:Initially, you will be using the usual iOS application or the Android application. That’s the entry point. So, using those devices, you can become participants as a viewer, or you can become a curator to curate basic content. We have 3D polygons for you to choose from, you could tuck away your content, or your world. And then we’ll move on to the next phase of devices, which is also provided by our company, which has a far more advanced system, camera assistance to perform advanced augmented reality. And after that, we’ll get into the glasses. We have been working on the glasses concept for quite a few years now. But it will be about two years before we’re able to introduce those kind of devices to the world, and that won’t just be virtual reality glasses. There will be one which blends virtual reality and what we call augmented reality into one device.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: So what are some of the business and commerce applications you foresee?

STEVE CHAO:The number one, in terms of heavy usage, is digital commerce, digital purchasing, like a shopping-type of application, is what we’re looking to build. Currently with building, aside from the AOX blockchain, the basic infrastructure, the first thing we’re building for the universe is we’re building an ability for people to create artifacts. So that’s like virtualized objects, which is a type of non-functional item much like the cryptocurrency that you see nowadays. So there’s the ability to create virtual content and provide a value. People will be able to trade against that, much like a game. The next phase, once that’s tradeable, then people will be able to import real world items such as art, paintings, and pianos into the virtual world and we will facilitate that kind of trading. Once the whole world has started to trade in this blockchain-based virtual world we can start revolutionizing how the new e-commerce platform will be performing. So, commerce would be a key application as a first step.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: What are the revenue streams for your company?

STEVE CHAO: Currently, what it has always been – the selling of mobile devices. We’ve introduced two generations of mobile phones. We haven’t broke even yet, because the company is being heavily invested in by myself and my partners. In the near future, once we introduce the next generation phone, the revenue will be a cost-plus model like the iPhone. In terms of the blockchain, we’re still studying various revenue streams, and possibly advertising as well. But currently, it’s mostly as it stands right now, it’s mostly device sales.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Okay, so once the virtual world is up and running, you won’t take any transaction fees on commerce? There won’t be any subscriber fees? Or you’re still contemplating all that?

STEVE CHAO: Well that’s getting into the company economics, so we do have a mechanism in place to compensate the people who put up with the infrastructure. We call them the delegates. They will provide infrastructure. But people who participate in the world would have to pay a very low transaction fee, a very low gas fee. And we will not be taking a cut of that. Because we’ll be making money from device sales, and the device is an essential element into this world. But not just our devices – in the future, we’ll be providing our platform, our base operating system, to other device manufacturers, so they can provide the same experience on their mobile phones. Because we have a model based on the device, we don’t necessarily have to make money on the world itself. The world itself can be managed by the tokens that we’re about to issue. And in the future, once the chain is being propagated around the world, we do have potential API’s for people to create their own tokens in this virtualized free world.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Okay. Are there going to be any activities prohibited in this virtual world you’re creating?

STEVE CHAO:That’s really entirely up to the constitution we will potentially draft. And that will require all the participants, not just the world builders, but also the delegates who will run the various nodes on our chain. So that’s something which is something entirely up to the community. But we will have a say in the beginning. But since the entire platform including chains is extremely decentralized, that will be entirely up to the community.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: How often will the community vote?

STEVE CHAO: In terms of choosing the delegates, we will be the first to propose the selected delegates and how the main net will be established. And once that’s been set to AOX Universe, that’s also subject to the community decision. Initially, it could be voted every other week, or you could vote every week. But honestly speaking, making a vote is being carefully reviewed at the moment. So that’s an on-going discussion currently.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: What’s your timeline for launch of this universe?

STEVE CHAO: That, I have to talk about the power chain first. Our timeline for the AOX power chain will be sometime around January 2019. And once we’re able to put up the entire main net, initially we do have 51 chains. But we don’t need 51 to run the main net. We need a minimum of three, and that can be done right around April, by the latest May of next year. As soon as that’s up, the basic edition of AOX Universe will be up and running at the same time. Because we’re running development of the two simultaneously currently.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Are you going to be doing your token sale before that event or after?

STEVE CHAO:We’re looking to do our token sale this month. We just created the project in the last month or so, and I myself have been watching since 2013. So we’re proposing to distribute the AOX token in October in our own exchange and there may be a few other exchanges which will participate in the purchase of such. But that’s being decided currently.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: You have your own exchange up and running?

STEVE CHAO:It will be up and running by the 10th of October, correct. It will be mostly a token to token exchange bearing the same Turing name.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Okay. How long will this go on, this token sale? Or this is an indefinite sort of ramp up on this?

STEVE CHAO:You mean how long the token sale is going to be? Is that your question?

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Yeah, exactly.

STEVE CHAO: We won’t go into all the details, but the token sale will last 100 days. Not consecutively, so it will run for 25 days, and then 10 idle days. And then another 25, and 10 idle days and then another 50. The reason for this is that we’re trying to block off all the big whales. Because it mainly runs off of our exchange, we’re able to filter through all the participants ahead of time. Because everyone will be pocketing their tokens, the coin, in our case, to their wallet of our exchange ahead of time, so we will not be running into a time lag. So, as soon as the purchase starts, we have a formula at the end of each day which will allocate the proportionate AOX tokens to the bitcoins being contributed. So even the price of AOX is entirely determined by the market. We don’t have a proposed offering price initially. It’s entirely up to the market.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: All right. Those are my questions. Do you have anything you want to tell me about that I didn’t ask you about?

STEVE CHAO: No, not at this moment. Just that our project is heavily focusing on the consensus because it’s a complicated federated chain, one of the first of its kind. And I personally think that the next step for blockchain is to solve the problem of scalability. Hence the federated aspects of the chain and the consensus becomes extremely important. But currently, we adopt EOS, but there may be more EOS-based algorithms that may be collectively considered.